Jim West On Chess: Safire's "Zugzwang" Article

Monday, October 15, 2007

Safire's "Zugzwang" Article

In a previous post regarding the origin of "patsy", I mentioned that language maven William Safire had written about chess expressions such as "zugzwang" and "sandbagging" in his On Language column. Here is the article on "zugzwang" from The New York Times Sunday magazine of December 8, 1985.

"My study of chess was accompanied by a strong attraction to music, and it was probably thanks to this that from childhood I became accustomed to thinking of chess as an art, and have never regarded it as anything else, for all the science and sport involved in it. And, moreover, an art which in some ways is closer to music than it is customary to think. Perhaps chess and music are drawn together by laws of harmony and beauty which are difficult to formulate and difficult to grasp, or perhaps by something else." - Vasily Smyslov